Bruce Ropner
Scion of a shipping empire who built his own motor racing circuit and won a British bobsleigh title
BRUCE ROPNER, who has died aged 89, was an exuberant and sporty member of a shipping clan which grew from a small partnership in Hartlepool to become Britain’s premier tramp fleet (a fleet of no fixed schedule). He worked for the firm until it was taken over in 1996 but his main enthusiasms took him well away from the north-east to St Moritz, where he hurtled down the ski slopes and bobsleigh and Cresta runs – becoming a British champion with his cousin Jeremy Ropner in 1962.
Cross-country running and a dated and rough form of football played at Harrow School had been Ropner’s preferred sports when in 1959 he was introduced to bobsleighing by Keith Schellenberg, the 1956 British champion and owner of the Scottish island of Eigg. He and both the Ropners were fearless, even though there was scant concern for anyone’s safety on the bobsleigh run in St Moritz in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Rather than being scared the first time you go down, you really just don’t know what’s happening. You are up on those corners, taking them at three, four or five times g-force,” Ropner said. “I always say there is little time for that.”
At the British bobsleigh championships at Garmischpartenkirchen in 1962 he was the brakeman and Jeremy the driver. They beat the Old Etonian Robin Dixon (later Lord Glentoran), and Tony Nash, a contemporary of theirs at Harrow, to win the two-man bob title.
Ropner would say thereafter that this was only because Dixon and Nash, who two years later won gold at the Winter Olympics, had crashed. This gung-ho approach to Alpine sports – tackling the Cresta was fraught with danger – particularly appealed to upper-class Englishmen of the kind who a few years earlier had rebelled against incarceration in prisoner-ofwar camps.
The Ropners were introduced to Lord Lucan, then John Bingham, who joined their four-man bob at the Swiss Championships in 1959, 15 years before he vanished after allegedly murdering the nanny of his two children. At the time they liked him but regarded him as dim, staying away from the casinos he frequented. Ropner was too energetic to spend his time gambling and drinking in London clubs.
Although Ropner felt he had to give up competing for titles on account of his wife’s fears for his safety, he bobsleighed for nearly seven decades, constructing his own track on his Camp Hill estate near Bedale in north Yorkshire. Two hip operations did not deter him.
He became chairman of the British Bobsleigh Association and introduced numerous young people to the sport, for which he was appointed OBE. Nicola Minichiello, the first British female bobsleigh driver to win a world championship, said her achievement would not have been possible without the support of Ropner, who, she said, helped her through some of her toughest times as an athlete.
When a party of Durham High School pupils tested themselves on his 50-metre track, Ropner spotted the potential of Mica Mcneill, who was to win a silver medal at the inaugural Youth Winter Olympics in 2012. He persuaded two firms to underwrite a project to open the sport to a wider group of people and helped to establish the national Futures programme.
Some 250 schools were invited to join, and it provided young people with an opportunity to see if they could achieve the power, precision and courage required by an Olympic athlete to drive bobsleighs at speeds of nearly 100mph.
Robert Bruce Beecroft Ropner was born on April 13 1933 in West Hartlepool, the son of Sir Robert Ropner, from whom he inherited another passion, for rare and fast cars; his mother was called Bee.
The story of how the family’s shipping business came into being in 1874 is a romantic one. The founder, also called Robert, stowed away in Hamburg as a teenager, determined on a life in the merchant service. He arrived in West Hartlepool seasick and decided he was better suited to staying on land. Within 20 years he had built up a successful shipbuilding, stockbroking and shipping empire.
Bruce was happy at Harrow, despite being told he was behaving “like a bloody Etonian” by a long-serving master, Mark Tindall, when he smuggled a wireless into a lesson so that he could catch up on England’s progress in a Test match. He spent his two years’ National Service in the Welsh Guards before joining the family business, in due course running the engineering division.
But he was too energetic and restless for office life. As well as participating in winter sports, he was a keen cross-country runner, once finishing an endurance marathon in less than the projected 24 hours. He owned several speedboats which he kept near the villa he acquired in the south of France, while at Camp Hill he created his own cricket ground for use by local players, inviting the celebrated umpire Dickie Bird to officiate with him in the inaugural match.
He also raised funds to convert a disused airfield near Darlington into a motor racing circuit. James Hunt, the glamorous world champion of the day, joined the heady mix of sports stars with whom Ropner liked to associate.
Ropner’s fondness for fast cars was apparent when he drove the Duke of Kent at 132mph in an eight-litre 1930s Bentley on the Great North Road, the forerunner to the A1; his passenger remarked, said Ropner, that “the front wheels barely touched the ground”.
Years later the Duke met Ropner’s son Robert and recounted this hair-raising journey when he discovered he was a relation.
Above all, Ropner liked to have fun and was given to unusual and spontaneous acts. At the 21st birthday party of Jeremy’s son, Clive, he filled a lavatory in a derelict washroom block on his Camp Hill estate with explosives and sent it 200 feet up in the air.
His friendship with Schellenberg led to summer games on Eigg and winter games in diverse snowbound places such as Les Avantes and Bergün in Switzerland, as well as Romania. Keen participants included Gunter and Rolf Sachs, Robin Guinness, and “Burghie”, the Earl of Westmorland.
Ropner was addicted to Laurel and Hardy and held regular screenings for guests at weekends; those were about the only occasions when he sat still. He once assembled a large group of enthusiastic children with spades, a couple of metal detectors and a JCB digger to unearth the engine of a crashed Spitfire which had been lying under the ground on his land since the Second World War.
Ropner is survived by his wife, Willow Hare, a debutante whom he met on holiday in the south of France. Their son runs a glamping centre at the Camp Hill estate, where their daughter also lives.